The Russian invasion of Georgia following Georgia's attempt to reestablish its dominance over its secessionist province of South Ossetia has certainly infuriated the neocons. Max Boot and Charles Krauthammer have called for various moves to isolate Russia from the West and from the international economic community. The Weekly Standard has an article by Stuart Koehl urging Georgians to fight on with US aid, and an article by Charlie Szrom of the American Enterprise Institute (aka neocon central) advocating massive US aid and alliances among Eastern European countries.

We know that neoconservatism is a Jewish movement — the news having finally reached the mainstream media with books like Jacob Heilbrunn's They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons. Now imagine for a moment that you are a typical Jewish neocon — that is, someone who sees the world fundamentally through Zionist lenses and, for starters, cannot fathom any difference between the interests of the United States and Israel. Or, what amounts to the same thing, imagine that you are an Israeli geopolitical strategizer. How would such a person think of the situation?

Quite clearly, you would be very unhappy that Russia has managed to crush the Georgian military and threaten regime change in Georgia. Israel has strong connections to Georgia. It has provided weapons and training to the Georgian military (although it recently stopped providing weapons after Russian complaints). Israel also has over $1.5 billion invested in Georgia, and Israel is proposing that the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline be extended to the Israeli port of Ashkelon for transshipment to south and east Asia. Two top ministers of the Georgian government are Jews with strong ties to Israel, including Defense Minister Davit Kezerashvili who is a former Israeli fluent in Hebrew.

The other side of the equation is that neocons have been hostile toward Russia. They supported the war that resulted in independence of Kosovo from Serbia, an ally of Russia. They also support Chechnyan independence from Russia, NATO membership for Eastern European countries formerly dominated by the USSR, and the aggressive US policy of providing missiles to Poland and the Czech Republic.

Why the neocon hostility toward Russia? We could certainly imagine that if Russia was controlled by the Israel Lobby and Jewish interests in the same way that the United States is, this would not be happening. Indeed, a major neocon complaint is that Russia delayed sanctions against Israel's arch-enemy Iran and has supplied Iran with nuclear material as well as weaponry designed to protect its nuclear installations.

Quite simply, we think that neocon hostility stems from the fact that Russia under Vladimir Putin proved to be far more nationalistic than is good for the Jews or for Israel. A landmark event was Putin's crackdown on the oligarchs — that small, overwhelmingly Jewish group of tycoons that came to control the industrial base of the USSR during the shift to capitalism. The oligarchs pumped huge amounts of money into the campaign to keep Boris Yeltsin in office and enrich themselves. They also supported Putin at first, but Putin gradually cut into the dominance of the oligarchs.

"When in 1996 it appeared that Yeltsin might lose his reelection to the Communists, the oligarchs poured millions into Yeltsin's campaign and began flooding the television airwaves (which they owned) with pro-Yeltsin "news" items while conspicuously failing to give any airtime to the opposition. With Yeltsin's victory, the loans-for-shares deal was finalized, catapulting the oligarchs from a small group of millionaires to a small group of billionaires. A few years later the oligarchs "guaranteed" (to use Berezovsky's term) that Vladimir Putin, like Yeltsin before him, would get elected in Russia's 2000 Presidential elections."

A turning point was the arrest and imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Yukos, the oil giant. Arch-neocon Richard Perle led the charge against Putin, calling for the ouster of Russia from the G-8 — the same sort of policy the neocons are proposing in the wake of the invasion of Georgia. Khodorkosky was viewed as without any feeling for Russian nationalism and far too friendly with the United States:

"Khodorkovsky has spent years pursuing what is essentially a personal, pro-American foreign policy, cultivating contacts with the most influential politicians, diplomats, bankers and public relations specialists in Washington — actions the siloviki, a group of hawks in the Kremlin made up of former KGB men, consider reprehensible....

"Compounding this perceived threat are Khodorkovsky's efforts to endear himself to the White House. One only need look at the people who have rallied to Khodorkovsky's defense [the article mentions Stuart Eizenstat, Richard Perle, George Soros, and John McCain (!)] to see how the siloviki could make a convincing case to cut Khodorkovsky down to size."

The crackdown against the oligarchs resulted in agonized complaints about the demise of democracy in Russia, and we are sure to see more such complaints in the wake of the invasion of Georgia. The neocons much preferred a democracy in which the Jewish oligarchs completely controlled the media and could buy large blocs of the Duma — in other words, a democracy that much more resembles our own.

The fact that Soros and Eizenstat — both associated with the left — also condemned Khodorkovsky's arrest suggests a Jewish consensus on this issue. Soros was also deeply involved in the so-called Rose Revolution that vaulted Mikheil Saakashvili into the presidency of Georgia.

Moreover, the most recent ADL document on anti-Semitism in Russia notes that despite better relations between the Russian government and Jews within Russia, there have been no changes in Russia's foreign policy toward Iran or its policy of engagement with the Palestinian group Hamas. This contrasts with the ADL's stance early in Vladimir Putin's presidency when the ADL complained that the Russian leadership did not immediately condemn what the ADL terms "Governor [of Kursk Alexander] Mikhailov’s blatantly anti-Semitic statement." Mikhailov had expressed his gratitude for the support Putin had given him in his struggle against "filth" — a reference to the previous governor of Kursk, Alexander Rutskoy, Boris Berezovsky, and the All-Russian Jewish Congress. Berezovsky is a former Russian-Jewish media tycoon who used his control of the main television channel to promote Boris Yeltsin for president in 1996 but fled Russia after the ascent of Putin after being charged with fraud. Rutskoy, who is Jewish, was seen as allied with Berezovsky. The ADL complained that the Russian leadership chastised Mikhailov only after a "storm of protest that Mikhailov’s conduct generated among Jews and the mainstream media in Russia and abroad."

No wonder Pat Buchanan recently termed democracy a "flickering star" because democratic governments are so often out of touch with the people they rule, whereas governments like China and Russia enjoy overwhelming popular support. This is so on a wide range of issues in the US — immigration policy being the most egregious example. In the area of foreign policy we have seen that a small cabal of neocons could successfully promote US involvement in a costly and disastrous war in Iraq — a war on behalf of Israel and certainly not in the interests of the United States.

And speaking of democracy, the fact that John McCain came to the defense of Khodorkovsky is yet another indication that he is completely tied into the neocon foreign policy establishment. Just recently it became known that Randy Scheunemann, McCain's foreign policy adviser, was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the government of Georgia. Scheunemann was also President of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, sponsored by Bill Kristols' Project for a New American Century. Kristol, like the other neocons, is eager for the US to stand up to Russia over Georgia: "Is it not true today, as it was in the 1920s and ’30s, that delay and irresolution on the part of the democracies simply invite future threats and graver dangers?" Ah, the old argumentum ad Hitlerum.

There can be no greater condemnation of American democracy than that John McCain will be the candidate of one of the major parties, while the other party will nominate Barack Obama.

Finally, we should remember that from 1881 until the fall of the Czar, in addition to dominating the revolutionary movement in Russia, there was a Jewish consensus to use their influence in Europe and America to oppose Russia. This had an effect on a wide range of issues, including the financing of Japan in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, the abrogation of the American-Russian trade agreement in 1908, and the financing of revolutionaries within Russia by wealthy Jews such as Jacob Schiff.